Can Such Things Be? eBook

“I will not submit unheard. There may
be powers that are not malignant traveling this accursed
road. I shall leave them a record and an appeal.
I shall relate my wrongs, the persecutions that I
endure—­I, a helpless mortal, a penitent,
an unoffending poet!” Halpin Frayser was a poet
only as he was a penitent: in his dream.

Taking from his clothing a small red-leather pocketbook,
one-half of which was leaved for memoranda, he discovered
that he was without a pencil. He broke a twig
from a bush, dipped it into a pool of blood and wrote
rapidly. He had hardly touched the paper with
the point of his twig when a low, wild peal of laughter
broke out at a measureless distance away, and growing
ever louder, seemed approaching ever nearer; a soulless,
heartless, and unjoyous laugh, like that of the loon,
solitary by the lakeside at midnight; a laugh which
culminated in an unearthly shout close at hand, then
died away by slow gradations, as if the accursed being
that uttered it had withdrawn over the verge of the
world whence it had come. But the man felt that
this was not so—­that it was near by and
had not moved.

A strange sensation began slowly to take possession
of his body and his mind. He could not have
said which, if any, of his senses was affected; he
felt it rather as a consciousness—­a mysterious
mental assurance of some overpowering presence—­some
supernatural malevolence different in kind from the
invisible existences that swarmed about him, and superior
to them in power. He knew that it had uttered
that hideous laugh. And now it seemed to be approaching
him; from what direction he did not know—­dared
not conjecture. All his former fears were forgotten
or merged in the gigantic terror that now held him
in thrall. Apart from that, he had but one thought:
to complete his written appeal to the benign powers
who, traversing the haunted wood, might some time
rescue him if he should be denied the blessing of
annihilation. He wrote with terrible rapidity,
the twig in his fingers rilling blood without renewal;
but in the middle of a sentence his hands denied their
service to his will, his arms fell to his sides, the
book to the earth; and powerless to move or cry out,
he found himself staring into the sharply drawn face
and blank, dead eyes of his own mother, standing white
and silent in the garments of the grave!

II

In his youth Halpin Frayser had lived with his parents
in Nashville, Tennessee. The Fraysers were well-to-do,
having a good position in such society as had survived
the wreck wrought by civil war. Their children
had the social and educational opportunities of their
time and place, and had responded to good associations
and instruction with agreeable manners and cultivated
minds. Halpin being the youngest and not over
robust was perhaps a trifle “spoiled.”
He had the double disadvantage of a mother’s
assiduity and a father’s neglect. Frayser
pere was what no Southern man of means is not—­a
politician. His country, or rather his section
and State, made demands upon his time and attention
so exacting that to those of his family he was compelled
to turn an ear partly deafened by the thunder of the
political captains and the shouting, his own included.